I, for sure, spend equal if not time writing the data flywheel code compared to architectural changes.

This has been bugging me for awhile, but I haven’t had time to sit down and write about it until now. In my mind there are three things that makes coming up with a good take about this (and also implementing it) hard:

1. This may be a problem that’s solved in much of the frontier labs (I would argue more because of workflow optimizations that sidestep the problem, see below)
2. The “solution” to the problem also seem extremely person-dependent, so it seems hard to make an overall suggestion.
3. Many people write it off as “necessary engineering”

I don’t purport to have a solution to the pipes problem here, but I want to spend a little time now to reflect about what I have been thinking about while spending days at the office writing pipes.

User Story

Sejin is the executive administrative assistant at Nueva, working on scheduling Liza, Lee, Terry, and the other admins against the members of the wider community. Sejin spends most of her day scheduling people, of which, the largest time drawn is spent convincing people to move their schedules “in favor” of that of another person (i.e. manually). The reason why this is done is because her approach to scheduling is one-shot: emailing everybody for general availability, noting in her mind who the high-priority attendees are (say, Liza), and if no times match asking/convincing those in lower priority to move their schedules. Although she enjoys the process of putting events together, she is particularly frustrated that, due to the busy schedules and often back-and-forth emails needed to get and conform everyone’s schedule, response rates to complicated scheduling problems are low.

The PSC is a supercomputing center.

A PKM is a tool (like this one!) to help manage your nodes and knowledge.

• storing AND processing; just storing is just PIM not PKM
• PKM = PIM (personal info management) + GTD + knowledge management
• goal: narrowing “flood” and focus on useful areas
• move from passive => active consumption
• create, not just regurgitate

PKM and Context

• store info based on context

Strategy

• What are you trying to organize
• what are the inputs?
  • email? lectures?:
    • “reference” type emails
    • lecture notes
    • tasks?
• what are you trying to make?
  • test? essays?
    • a time blocking schedule
    • studying for tests (i.e. for linear, etc.)
• what does your process look like?
  • mishmash of topic based notes and content based notes
• what parts of it would you like to improve?
  • article capture workflow: how to process random readings topic wise?
  • knowledge capture: how to come across new content and capture them somewhere?
  • todo/notes integration: task management and note taking currently lives separately, how to unify them?

zettlekasten

Key ideas

• appreciating PL as a techincal field
  • OS people cares only about dynamic system—build a good runtime/OS, etc.
  • PL people cares only about static system—build a compiler, etc.
• think systematically about PL tools
• what we can do, what we can’t do, what will be able to do
• basics of active research in PL

equal in expressive power

• SKI calculus
• Lambda calculus
• Turing machines

Lectures

• SU-CS242 SEP242024

Combinator Calculus

• SU-CS242 SEP262024
• SU-CS242 OCT012024

Lambda Calculus

• SU-CS242 OCT032024
• SU-CS242 OCT102024
• SU-CS242 OCT152024
• SU-CS242 OCT172024

Objects

• SU-CS242 OCT242024

Programming Abstractions and Logic Programming

• SU-CS242 OCT312024
• SU-CS242 NOV072024
• SU-CS242 NOV142024
• SU-CS242 NOV192024

Contravariance

• SU-CS242 NOV212024
• SU-CS242 DEC032024